Baking Stuff, Burning Stuff, Stretching Stuff, Complaining About Stuff

 I am having a weird sensation (weird but not unaccustomed) where thinking about sitting down to write a blog post feels like going for a colonoscopy or writing a math exam. This makes no sense - writing a blog post is neither mandatory nor unpleasant. Just going to free-associate here to get something down so I can stop feeling like I'm in front of a firing squad. 

I got these new notecards and I am currently obsessed with them. Making a list of people I can send them to. 

On Saturday I threw a party for Matt and our friend Margot, who were born two days apart. I made them each their favourite cake and then realized I'd inadvertently made it look like I was having a party for my 6-year-old twins.

And yes, we did light candles and sing happy birthday to them - as a group we really commit to a bit when a bit is there to be committed to.

I got my hair cut and coloured last week. I really like my stylist - she is funny and kind and loves Eve (whose hair she also cuts) and works with me on my wonky hair. The past few times, though, I feel like she either forgets what we usually do or doesn't really listen to me. I know it's hair and it grows back, but it's expensive enough and my hair is troublesome enough that I get cranky when I don't get to have my magic hair for a few weeks after it's done. I was not feeling great and complaining to Eve on Facetime a couple of nights ago (while totally aware this is a totally first-world problem) - particularly that one streak of my bangs was blonde instead of brown which was making it not lie well with the rest of my bangs. I knew I would probably feel better the next day (more on this later), it was just really vexing me. I'm more just saying this because weirdly, I quite like the pictures of me from the party.

This is a dress I bought at a fun store downtown while Zarah was visiting last summer. If I'd thought I would like the picture I probably would have moved the Roots bag.

I had to crop this more severely than I usually would because I accidentally made it look like I was wearing a tiny Elmira College baseball hat (and like Angus is about to fire a ball over my shoulder).

Margot took this one, so it has less weird stuff needing to be cropped out. 

In a few weeks when I look back at these pictures and don't like them anymore they probably will have disappeared from this post, so no harm done? 

The "gentleman in his little vest, sipping" that Swistle mentioned from this post is our friend Tony, and Lucy finds him similarly enchanting.

Had my first big air fryer fail. I tried to make roasted Brussels sprouts. The recipe said to use the Air Roast function, which I hadn't used before, and may not again. When I do them in the oven, the Brussels sprouts get crispy outside and soft inside and the little leaves that fall off get super crunchy. In the air fryer, the bigger pieces of sprouts were uncooked after being roasted the recommended time, and the outer leaves were black. I ate one experimentally and Matt tried not to laugh when I yelped "it's charcoal" while spitting it into the sink as quickly as humanly possible. Big fan of every other vegetable I've cooked in it. 

So about the night I wasn't feeling well. Earlier in the day I had tried to go for a walk and it was sunny but so bitterly cold and windy I felt like the sun should be dinged for false advertising. My eyes were watering so much I couldn't see where I was walking, and my lower back immediately started to ache. I flounced home after a short walk and decided to do yoga instead. I went to YouTube and looked for something healing or comforting because I was sore and frazzled. I ended up doing a 'yoga for lymphatic flow'. It felt really good at the time, and the backs of my thighs were pleasantly achy afterwards. When I went to bed and tried to read, though, I felt wretched. My shoulders, neck, back, hands and ankles all hurt. Just the blankets resting on my feet was incredibly painful. I was coughing more than I had in months, and everything just generally sucked. I had no idea what was going on, and finally just turned off the light and tried to sleep, while feeling moderately sorry for myself. 

The next day I found some woo on the internet about lymphatic massage making you feel momentarily ill because of the lymphatic system moves toxins through the body so they don't stay and make you sick. For the life of me I cannot decide if this is good sense or wacky woo, but the next day I felt much better. Maybe the recent intense physiotherapy and yoga are just overtaxing my immune system and hey look, it's March Break, maybe I'll just calm down and read and rest for a few days. Also, my bangs are fine and I am aware that it was probably the flushing toxins talking. 

There, that wasn't so hard. You're not that scary.

In Recovery Of Various Sorts

 I just went for a walk with Lucy. We are having wholly unseasonable spring-ish weather and while everyone else has been rhapsodizing about it I've been sort of obstinately sullen, partly because I don't feel like having to go sleeveless to be comfortable already but mostly because of an unattractively self-righteous sense of WAKE UP PEOPLE THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. I've been dimly aware that this is dumb for a number of reasons, but principally because my being a churlish malcontent doesn't CHANGE the weather one iota. And today I woke up and the window was cracked and the light and the air were delicious so I decided to get over myself. 

Wore a t-shirt. Was still too hot by the end.

A few weeks ago a blog friend said she was not going to discuss a difficult family situation because that didn't fit in with what she wants her blog to be, which is a cheerful place to talk about books and pets etc. I thought oh shit, does that mean I shouldn't be putting heavy stuff on my blog? Not that I usually discuss big world events, because other people do that with more insight and intellect than I can, and I recognize that a lot of it would be ineffective hand-wringing. But I do talk about depression semi-frequently. Should I stop? 

Then I thought, I'm doing it again. She's talking about HER blog, she didn't say anything about MY blog. 

I've accepted in the past few years that I am not nearly as neurotypical as I always thought I was. Mostly this has been a welcome realization because it explains a lot. I've become really good at masking, which works in most situations, but the core issues are still there, and every now and then the mask slips. I've always had a really hard time just admiring someone close to me without this frequently translating to thinking I have to be exactly like them, down to really ridiculous details. The first year or two I knew Collette (HI COLLETTE), every time she was making me tea and she asked how I took it I'd say "same as you", thinking that I would be happy enough drinking it clear, or with a little milk and/or some sugar. Finally she looked at me and said "just tell me WHAT YOU WANT IN IT". Once I was talking to my neighbour back in the days when we were friendly but not really good friends yet, and she said she was 36 and I said "me too" I WAS NOT THIRTY-SIX I WAS THIRTY-FOUR.

Anyway. I was thinking about this on my walk and sort of laughing and cringing at the same time. I still do it, but I'm more aware of it. That'll have to do for now.

Yesterday I woke up tired, went to work, dragged myself around at work and then went to physio. Went to pick up Lucy, went home, made dinner, did a couple other things, realized I felt like absolute hell and went to get ready for bed. Matt got home and I said I was afraid I was getting the flu, or possibly experiencing a sudden-onset full-body cancer. He asked what my day was like and I told him. He suggested that maybe I was just having a reaction to physio.

I said "hm, yeah. He pounded on my back and neck and needled my neck and both arms." Matt was like "well, yeah..." and I said "oh, and used the shockwave gun". Matt: "Jesus Christ, so you were punched and stabbed AND shot and you're wondering why your body is mounting a bit of an immune response?"

I'm not putting in a picture which feels unnatural but my fucking pictures keep fucking disappearing from my fucking posts and it's fucking pissing me off. 

I am now in our group chat trading funny German compound words and I can't even remember how this discussion started but I love my friends (omg, it was because I got home and Michael was talking about being in his backyard in a t-shirt worrying about sunburn and global warming and asked if there was a word that meant feeling both happiness and dread and I said probably something German, we have COME FULL CIRCLE, and also wow, my memory is really bad). 

Hey Good Lookin'

 So. The air fryer.

I was still planning on hemming and hawing and second-guessing myself a little more even after the comments on this post convinced me that I probably would get an air fryer at some point. But then my parents were over for Eve's slightly delayed birthday dinner on Sunday since she was home for break, and my dad asked me if I had an air fryer, and then said "dammit" when I didn't, because he had decided they were getting an air fryer and wanted me to tell them which one to get. While I was looking up the comments on the post to read to him and noodling on the internet at the table, it popped up that Best Buy had the Ninja Max XL on sale for a hundred dollars less than regular price. Suddenly my dad was barking "do it!" and I was ordering two air fryers.

I was a bit apprehensive about finding counter space, but then I always am, and then it invariably turns out that I keep a lot of crap on the counter and even though it seems like that crap really has to live on the counter, it actually really doesn't.

I

 set it up and then might have ended up leaving it sitting there until I screwed up my courage to use it, much like my instant pot, a Black Friday impulse buy that lurked balefully on the counter for a year and a half while two separate friends offered to come over and walk me through how to use it before I threw caution to the winds and pressure cooked some Mongolian beef one madcap Friday night. 

Matt was deep in prep for the Valentine's Day Guys Cook night, but he had also made homemade bread crumbs from a rock-hard baguette (he watches chefs on Youtube and then randomly does stuff, it's mostly cool, sometimes alarming). He had been planning to do some kind of chicken schnitzel while Eve was home but it didn't end up happening, so while he was grocery shopping I was making cilantro lime instant pot chicken for Eve to take back (because the instant pot is my bitch now, I've come so far) and had a leftover chicken breast, which I cut into strips and breaded with his bread crumbs and cooked in the air fryer. And whoo-hoo, I was now a person who fried stuff with air. 

This is my small gallery of air fryer stuff: kale chips, Cuban ham and cheese tarts and maple-chili pork belly bites that I made to go with garlic noodles and broccoli last night. For the foreseeable future, expect me to be obnoxiously air-fryer-positive with the zeal of the newly converted. It's so easy! It's so much less scary than the instant pot! You can open it WHILE IT'S GOING. I love roasted vegetables but I hate heating up the oven for a the small amount I make because leftover roasted vegetables are mushy and gross. It's so easy to work at counter-height! It saves my back!

My parents have only made chicken legs so far, but my dad was half rapturous, half pissed off because he thinks they might even be better than barbecued, and he barbecues in every calendar month (and this is northern Canada, we got weather). The little recipe book that came with it has one for mini cheeseburger meatloaves, which will probably make Angus want an air fryer too. 

Will my enthusiasm inevitably wane? Almost certainly. I am comfortable with this, I have spent more money on dumber things (during lockdown I bought a spaetzle maker. A SPAETZLE MAKER.) 

Our dinner party was fabulous. The guys knocked it out of the park. There was lobster bisque, a salmon poke bowl, beef cheek with escargot and jellied mustard, seared wagyu beef with smoked salmon and peach, and Matt made maple pudding, crepes with maple buttercream and candied prosciutto, maple fudge and maple and bacon glazed pecans and then most of us slipped into a sugar coma (is there such a thing as homi-monoglyceride-cide?)

I'm probably missing stuff, because around course three I took a tiny bottle of vodka from the bathroom emergency box and made Collette do a deconstructed vodka tonic with me and after that things were still delicious but less pronouncable (wtf is kohlrabi anyway). 

Even with all the amazing food, the highlight of the night was probably Cody, Collette's mom's bird who worked the room like a tiny feathered lothario and could have gone home with anyone's wife. Or Dave.

Happy Eve Week

 It feels like longer than a week since that last post. 

Saturday I came down in the morning, planning to have breakfast and then get groceries for Eve's week at home. Matt was watching tv and looked up and answered a couple of my questions but then went back to watching tv, moving a little closer. I was running water and dishing out food and I was feeling a little self-conscious about making noise while he was watching tv. So, like a totally normal person, I got mad at him for watching tv and making me feel like I might be disturbing him. He looked understandably confused by this. After I got home from grocery shopping I apologized for being weird and bitchy and getting mad at him for watching tv at me. I said I was feeling oddly nervous, which didn't make sense because the only anomalous event approaching was Eve coming home, which I was totally happy about.

Matt said cautiously that I sometimes have a bit of trouble adequately differentiating myself from Eve and I said "OH, I'm being crazy because half of me is on a train?" and he said "probably, yes".

The week has been great. We went for a family day sunny cold dog-walk. Eve and I went to the mall - the only time I approach anything that could be termed enjoyment involving a mall is when I'm with Eve. We watched the Simpsons. Her friend Jackson came over and we watched Drag Race and ate burned nachos. We went to see Mean Girls. 

She's worn the same dress to the last two Arts and Science formals and she wanted to look for something new that was less traditionally formal. We found a fun pink skirt in the first store, and then floundered a little looking for the right top, but I think the end result is going to be really fun. This is the outfit - I will post a pic when she actually wears it for the formal. 

She mentioned that she wanted a couple of tops for bar-hopping, because she doesn't really have a lot of going-out tops and she's finally in a bit of a going-out era. We marched into Garage and said we were there to try on every slutty shirt they had. It was hilariously fun - one looked very pretty from the front, and from the back? NAKED. One was almost naked all over, and looked great but she knew she'd never actually wear it. She found a gorgeous black tank with wide straps, a square neck and gathered sides, and an adorable pink short-sleeved crop top - she's loved pink forever but it's suddenly around in clothing this season. 

Saturday night Matt and I started watching The Maestro, one of the four last Best Picture contenders I need to watch. I read an article that began "Bradley Cooper really wants an Oscar", which I tend to think whenever someone stars in a biopic, and oh boy, was this ever not an exception. I liked what we watched, but halfway through I started falling asleep (this is not usual for me, but I think my overidentifying with Eve's train journey wore me out - it was nothing to do with the movie, I'm looking forward to finishing it). 

Work was crap today. The challenging class is still much improved, but, strangely, my first two classes who are usually great bucked the trend. The second teacher often sends students individually or in groups to get books so it doesn't turn into a socializing period. The first teacher said he might do the same. Generally this means they send students during the class's library period, which is 20-25 minutes long. Somehow today students came for an hour and twenty minutes. And they were loud and destroyed the shelves. And I think some of them came back more than once.

I was as baffled as I was angry. By the time I finished classes at recess I was so worn out and on edge I slapped a sign on the door saying the library was closed - often I let students come in and read or work quietly - just so I could hear myself think for ten minutes. Then I texted the other librarian to help gauge whether I was over-reacting (she didn't think I was). Then I emailed the teachers and asked if they would consider only sending students during their actual library time, which seemed like an obvious thing, but here we are. Actually I don't really mean that to sound as bitchy as it does, they are good teachers and teaching is really freaking hard, and I hope and assume today was just a one-off.

On the way home I had to stop and pick up contact lenses, and my head was pounding and I was exhausted and I almost didn't stop to get the mail, but I did, and you guys.

Suzanne sent me a Valentine. 

I don’t think Idris Elba stuffed in an envelope would have lifted my spirits more comprehensively.

In conclusion, please enjoy this random collection of pics of Eve being home, weird chemistry stuff left by my workspace, her adorable laptop stickers, and the blurry dark selfies we ended up with after forgetting to take them when we were anywhere aesthetically pleasing and well lit.

Also, I got an air fryer. 

Five For Friday: Oscars Edition

 I am having a weird week in a weird month in a (typically, so is it even weird) winter, and I sat here literally unable to figure out or remember how to begin a blog post, so thank fuck I remembered it's Friday and I can just do FFF. It has gotten cold and snowy again after a couple of weeks of mild grayness, and I like this more, although I don't volunteer that widely. Except I guess I just did. Oops. Weird. 

1. I decided a couple of weeks ago to try to watch all the Best Picture nominees for the Oscars. The main reason is so I could make a list and cross things off the list and feel list-accomplished for doing nothing but watching movies, because low-stakes validation is helpful right now. 

There are ten movies up for Best Picture. That is too many, in my opinion. I thought five was a good number. Also, what the heck, precisely, is 'best picture' supposed to mean? Okay, I googled desultorily and I am not interested in going down that road too far. 

Here are the ones I have watched, alone or with others, and my opinions, which I do not expect anyone to share:

-Barbie: Saw in the theatre with Eve and her friend Jackson and my friend (Eve's other friend's mom who is now my friend) Jody. Liked it a lot. The aesthetic, Margot Robbie's and Ryan Gosling's and America Ferrera's performances, the satirizing of the patriarchy. I love Greta Gerwig as a director.

- Oppenheimer: I missed the chance to do a Barbenheimer experience when they were both out. My  husband is an engineer with a degree in Engineering Physics, so it was an obvious choice for us to watch, but the timing didn't work out. He rented it one morning while I was still asleep and he was about to leave the country yet again, and told me there were a couple days left in the rental for me to watch it. Which I did, but in shifts, because it is long and I was having attention span issues. 

I liked it. It didn't blow me away. It seemed like a very obvious "Best Picture" sort of movie in a Hollywood way. Cillian Murphy was compelling. My husband was disappointed that it didn't go more into the physics. He said "it was more just about...." and I said "...Oppenheimer?" and he said "shut up". I understood what he wanted, but I would have thought it was unlikely in this type of movie. Favourite line: "you're not just self-important, you're actually important". 

-Killers of the Flower Moon: watched alone on Netflix, again in shifts, more because I found it too upsetting to watch all at once. I thought it was really, really good. Personally I think Leonardo DiCaprio should have been nominated over Robert De Niro for Best Supporting Actor - Collette (HI COLLETTE) said he was too old to be convincing in that role, which may be but I am crap at judging people's ages, and his mannerisms and way of talking and his way of bearing himself seemed to embody the character perfectly and were utterly convincing to me. Lily Gladstone was fantastic. 

-Past Lives: rented while Matt was away for three weeks in January and watched alone. I loved it - I think it's my favourite so far, by a tiny margin. I love the way it concentrates on moments and lets silences stretch out. All the actors were phenomenal, and I could watch Greta Lee - her expressions, her hair swinging, the way her demeanour seems to change subtly depending on whether she's speaking English or Korean. It's a bit like a more cerebral, Korean Sliding Doors. The characters are allowed to show vulnerability in a way that almost challenges belief. I also loved the blithe use of "12 years pass" twice. 

-Anatomy of a Fall: I rented this at the same time but didn't watch it while Matt was away. We planned to watch it one Saturday night when he got home but I had a migraine, so we watched it with our dinner from Take Another Bite on Valentine's Day (which was amazing). 

It was long. It was really, really long. And French. And maybe not the best choice for Valentine's Day. Matt said "it's kind of like Kramer vs. Kramer if one Kramer is dead". We were doing the dinner in courses, which was kind of good because we would pause the movie and chat a little and take a break, because two and a half hours of people demonstrating intense anguish is a lot. But my humorous puerile whining aside, it's very well done as a character study and I can see why Sandra Huller (sorry, can't figure out how to do an umlaut) was nominated - the actor who played the son was fantastic as well. Also, if it's at all accurate, French courtroom procedures are very different from, well, from what I know of American court procedures from American tv, so who the hell knows. But there was a lot of unchallenged speculation. 

-The Holdovers: watched with Collette last night. We were going to see it in the theatre but by the time we coordinated a time it was only playing late, so I bought it on Apple TV, which was cheaper than both of us buying a ticket anyway. It was excellent. Paul Giamatti is the perfect embodiment of the set-in-his-ways, socially awkward, erudite boarding school teacher, not really fitting in with his colleagues and lamenting the "vulgar, rancid Philistines" he has to teach. Dominic Sessa also really tears it up - bold, angry, vulnerable - and Da'Vine Joy Randolph? WOW. I had a sense of how the movie would play out, but the details were magnificent. It was the only one that made me cry. 

We're going to watch American Fiction (which is based on a book by Percival Everett, whose book The Trees was insanely good) next week. Then I have Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos (loved The Killing of a Sacred Deer, from what I've heard of this one I am interested and a little grossed out already), The Zone of Interest, and The Maestro. 

2. From The Holdovers I learned that I have been mentally pronouncing Anaxagoras with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Wait, no, I just looked it up and according to what I found, Paul Hunham actually pronounced it wrong. Huh. 

3. Last Monday a student walked up to the desk and barked out "Minecraft books", which is a thing I tend to gently correct. I said "you mean 'can you please help me find the Minecraft books?'", but I guess he didn't hear the 'you mean' part, and he said "I don't know where they are, that's why I asked you." Which was funny. 

4. Eve comes home tomorrow for the week and I cannot WAIT to squish her. She has a semester that is way heavier on reading and writing than her usual science-heavy fare, and it's been fun having her bounce ideas off me and doing some editing of her papers. I have never done that Google Docs thing where I can suggest edits and she can incorporate them in real time and it's like a different version of FaceTime that is really fun. Also, she had to write a reflection on the book Cassandra by Christa Wolf, and the first line was "Before I started this book I asked my mom what she knew about Cassandra because she reads everything and knows everything about books", which was, obviously, not true, but still nice to read. I'm so lucky I got the kids I did. 

Picture of Eve from Valentine's Day Facebook memories

5. I have been resolute that I would not get an air fryer, but should I get an air fryer? 

Black Cats and Horseshoes and Birthdays

 Predictably, now that I've finished the book review posts, I am feeling a magnificent disinclination to blog. Or rather, I think "I should blog" and then think "but about what?" How do I begin, if not by cutting and pasting book titles and plot rundowns and looking up quotes in my book notes? 

January is always a slog for me. I almost invariably have a headache for most of the month - a few things have been investigated, but it seems to come down to some weird combination of atmospheric pressure and my body chemistry being, well, weird. I still had a headache at the very beginning of February, but then it stopped for a few days, and now it's intermittent, which is an improvement. My mental health plummets no matter what I do to shore it up (to be clear, what I do is not all that heroic - drink lots of water, get a bit more sleep than usual, try to move a little more but fail often because just getting to and from work is exhausting). 

I forget where I was going with this - I swear I think I was going somewhere other than Whine City, Population: Me (quick, somebody tell me to take Highway 52 to Copetown). Oh, maybe I kind of remember. So it was the first week of February and things were looking up a little and I had done some cleaning and organizing and cooking in addition to working and then reading and stuffing an assload of carbs in my face. And then yesterday SUCKED. I woke up with a weird headache at the back of my head. So many kids were annoying ("I'm looking for that book with a bug on the front". "Sorry, I don't know what you mean, do you know that title?" "What's a title?") My two grade six classes in the afternoon who are usually lovely had a sub instead of the teacher that I love. The substitute looked about seventeen and was wearing track pants and a white t-shirt with sneakers - I thought he was a high school co-op student. It would have been funny if he then turned out to be surprisingly competent, but this was not the case. In the first slot, he held court before a group of adoring sixth-grade girls while the rest of the class did cartwheels and screamed their heads off. In the second slot the kids were basically okay, but this was probably not due to his behaviour, which consisted of sitting at a table with one other kid and looking at Guinness World Record Books. 

It seemed like every road I tried to drive on was blocked by someone driving weirdly. Lucy, who hadn't peed on the stairs once in Matt's long absence, peed on the stairs. I finished a puzzle and there were two pieces missing (actually that one didn't bother me as much as I would have thought, especially since it was a regift and not a purchase).

I was pretty cranky at work, until one boy asked me how my day was going and then said he hoped the rest of it was good and I got over myself a little. By the time I went to bed it was seeming fairly amusing, but I hoped today would be better.

It was almost freakishly better.

I was getting ready for work, wherein I start stacking all the things I need at the top of the two stairs down to the entrance. My purse, my bag with the seat cushion that saves my back, my fan, my water bottle and my lunch bag, another water bottle for my longer commute on Thursdays, and the bag with my boots to change into at school. Today there was also a table fan that I needed to leave in the mailbox for someone from the Freecycle group to pick up. So there was a lot going on, and I tipped over my water cup, which had a lid, but the lid had a hole, and a fair bit spilled. But it spilled in the one direction where it got absolutely nothing wet, and there was a towel right there that I was about to throw downstairs for the laundry.

I got a really good parking spot at work. The first two classes are grade sixes and come in groups, and they were all happy and chatty and asked me questions and thanked me for every answer. Then my challenging class showed up. They've had a new teacher, starting last week. 

You guys. I don't know what the hell she did, but holy shit, it was a one hundred and eighty degree difference. They lined up quietly. They came in and I congratulated them on that and handed out their cards. They got their books and sat at tables and read or drew bookmarks. I had cordial interactions with many of the boys who could not have been more jerkish a few weeks ago. I'm trying really hard not to think that other teacher was bad. Maybe they just didn't click with her. Maybe all the good will evaporate and it will be back to crappy normal next week. It was a really nice change anyway.

My last class was awesome - we read a book about a dog who does ballet. 

After work I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things. I walked in and tried to pull out a cart, already bracing myself because at this store you have to pull a cart out by its front, not its handle, and they almost always refuse to separate from the one behind. There was a woman getting a cart from the next row, and without missing a beat she reached over and held onto the cart behind mine so I could pull mine out smoothly. I thanked her profusely after I picked up my jaw from her insanely well-timed act of thoughtfulness. 

ANYway, in the midst of all this, my youngest child turned TWENTY-ONE, *stacks my dusty bones on ice floe preparatory to being shoved off into oblivion*. After her hellish week of being sick she had a hellish week of catching up on all the stuff she had to do less of while being sick, culminating in an organic chemistry mid-term at SEVEN O'CLOCK on a Friday evening, which seems like a wholly dickish time to plan an organic chemistry mid-term. And then she went out drinking AFTER IT (this is not unusual for most university students but is somewhat for my early-bedtime loving homebody). They went to a speakeasy with a door behind a bookcase that you needed a passcode for, just in case you weren't already feeling like your life could be way cooler than it is. 

If that wasn't trippy enough, she went out AGAIN on Saturday, although she had to chug a mini-Coke to stay up until they went out at eight-thirty. 

When she lived here, we would always take a picture of her the night before her birthday, on her last night of being the age she was. Now she has to send me one, sometimes with bonus housemates.

On her actual birthday yesterday I ordered fancy cinnamon buns for the house instead of a cake. 

She's home for reading week week after next, when we can do the family celebration. My Facebook memories yesterday were a parade of birthday posts.

Now that she can legally drink in the United States (which she celebrated by drinking fake-illegally), perhaps I will raise a glass in Canada. Or maybe not - my head kind of hurts again, maybe I'll just go to bed. But look, I blogged and didn't talk about books! Much!